Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

The web is still green. New ideas that shift the way we use it are emerging everyday and the momentum of innovation is increasing. From YouTube, to Flickr, to Twitter, to Digg, all of these businesses are successful because they have taken simple concepts and implemented them well. Embracing this philosophy I have constructed the following list of 5 online businesses I wish to build someday.

1. Free and Organized Online Education Tool

   There are endless resources on the net to teach you a variety of different things, unfortunately I have never seen a single universal resource that is conducive to learning. Now I know many people will reference Wikipedia or perhaps Yahoo Answers but these sites (in my opinion) are primarily useful for research and not necessarily iterative learning. The perfect online education site would need to be organized based on a subject hierarchy, have progressive lessons based on each of those subjects, and allow people to contribute to lesson content using a variety of text, photos, audio, or video. If exposure to this site could influence people to immediately visit it whether they want to learn how to speak Spanish or learn to play the Acoustic Guitar then I would categorize that business as a success.

2. Central Web Income Tool

   Everyone wants to make money on the Internet. From house moms to stock brokers the online income craze has hit pretty much everywhere and the only real question is where do people start. If you work in the tech industry it’s an easy answer, you build an online business. This answer doesn’t apply to the average non-techie since they have neither the technical skills nor the interest to pursue such an ambitious undertaking. So how does the everyday Joe/Jane make money on the net then? Well, currently there are a variety of programs out there such as our own Blogitive.com which will pay you to blog or maybe Dreamstime.com that will let you sell your photos online but there is no central resource that will present all of these options in one place. There is a strong need on the net for a central tool that provides a variety of ways for normal people to make money online.

3. Social Media Search Engine

   Traditional search engines do a great job providing you results to factual information, but they fall short when it comes to leveraging social media for more recent opinion based results. Currently I am working on my side project Zudos.com which is a search engine that provides a variety of social media results based on your search term. The following example is a good demonstration on how a search tool such as this can be valuable. Let’s say you search for the term “health care”, in a traditional search engine you would get results that reference such sites as Wikipedia, the White House, and NPR, all of which are very “official” and factual websites. A search for “health care” on Zudos will result in something much different, instead you will see personal videos of debate regarding health care, blog postings from everyday people on their take regarding the latest health care issues, and social news links referencing the most recent popular articles about health care. Even though both search tools provide very useful information I believe that tools such as Zudos are a necessity to provide people with different options regarding their search depending on what type of information they are looking for.

4. Easy Book Collaboration Community

   Millions of people write in their blogs everyday yet there is no excellent community out there that embraces the idea of collaborative writing. Sure, there are plenty of tools that allow collaboration but that is a far cry from encouraging and providing easy tools for random collaborative writing. My ideal application would allow an author to create a chapter list with rough story guidelines. Once this skeleton is created people can apply to contribute to the book in exchange for authorship credit to the book and possibly equity rights based on the percentage of contribution to the story. Once a book is complete an author should be able to submit the book to a variety of publishers for a fee, also the option of self-publishing should be available.

5. A Public People Database

   This idea is scary but inevitable. A site that lists people and allows the public to contribute content to any people page. I have seen WikiYou.com which is cool and follows this idea but my preference would be to have a more organized layout and an easier method to contribute content such as allowing snippets of information such as notes, photos, video, or audio uploads regarding that person. Of course the glaring problem of this site would be the dirt or private information that might get slung around, not to mention the fact that some people just may not want to have a page about them on the net for the public to screw with. I have no idea at the moment how that would be handled but there is one thing I am sure of, this is coming whether people like it or not. It’s just too tempting of an idea.